Here is a detailed synopsis of what happened to the forum... No doubt you all have questions so this will answer them hopefully and show you what you can do to help restore the site to 100%.
First of all, we were not hacked (well according to our hosts anyway), the official word from them after a lot of hassle was that someone ran a rogue script on the server that DBF and Retro-Remakes was hosted on.
The script executed its' self over 500,000 times and corrupted the server resulting in total data loss, everything was destroyed, even the directory structure of the site was wiped out which meant that I could not put a place holder page up at first. This was very frustrating.. The damage occured at a lower level than my control panel for the website, cpanel loaded with errors, I could not even access the site by ftp, it was all gone.
Hostpapa have been grossly unproffessional, uncaring and terrible to deal with, I have not recieved so much as an apology from them for the incident, all they told me was "the server is back up it should be safe for you to rebuild your site now".
Utter, Utter shit heads. Don't do business with this company.
Anyway, obviously you are looking at DBF right now so how come you can still see it if everything was destroyed?
One Word... Backups.
I am a dilligent webmaster, I back up the database every friday evening, fortunately I had just backed it up before the site crashed, we have not lost a single post as far as I can tell.
Tetra had backups of Retro-Remakes and He has totally restored that site.
As for files... Well, you must understand that there were 2.6gb of files on the server. I did not habitually download these file backups, I backed up the whole site twice every month and saved the backup to the root folder (to save costs as I have a download limit with my isp).
I would normally download a full backup to my computer each month, a HD crash earlier on in the year meant that I lost all hard copies of DBF since the end of 2008 until june but I thought I was ok because I had downloaded quite a recent one(July), for verification ask Jim, I told him that I had just taken a full backup about a month ago.
Little did I know that my FTP program was in ascii transfer mode when I downloaded it resulting in a useless 2.6gb archive.
This has a very profound effect on the site because all the post attachments that have been added since August 2008 are gone, if you click on them they will go to error 404.
The same thing is true for avatars and compo sigs awarded after this date.
I have managed to restore about 3,000 of the attachments, the rest of the restoration is going to be down to you all, I will open a thread so that you can upload new attachments for your posts and the site moderators and admins will edit them into your posts.
There will be instructions in that thread of how to go about it and I'll be issuing guidelines to the mods so that they know how to do it for you. If any of you want to voulunteer to help fix the posts, please let me know so I can give you the needed privilages on a temporary basis.
So, a list of things to be fixed;
- Some Compo Sigs Need To Be Restored. (If you have been awarded a sig and it's not showing please DO NOT edit it out of your sig, once I replace these files it will fix automatically).
- Some Avatar are missing (please re-upload your avatar if you are affected).
- Missing attachments need to be replaced (with your help please).
- New portal needs to be created to interface with the new software.
- Googlebot and Spiders Mod needs adding.
- Arcade Mod needs adding.
- Any other bugs that are bound to be found.
- A New theme is needed for the site.
Finally, this is the third time in our history that we have been brought down to our knees and we have always come back strong... I did have a dark week when I wondered if I should put it all back online, I worked fucking hard this week to get this much back, I must say that the many messages of support I have had from members of this community have been a great help and probably convinced me to start again, I was ready to throw the towel in.
Anyway it's back, enjoy it, if you find anything that needs fixing, please let us know in this thread.
Nick.